Adventure Girl

SHE MAY NOT be faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive, like Supergirl, but in her own way Lisa Mullen is Adventure Girl-or, to use her proper title, Project Manager, Adventure, Lands’ End.

The catalog’s department of adventure provides corporate sponsorship for such projects as Hodding Carter’s attempts to recreate Leif Ericson’s voyage from Greenland to North America; Will Steger’s wilderness journals; and the Jess brothers’ experiences helping their parents (among other scientists) tag Beluga whales off Somerset Island near the Arctic Circle.

We spoke to Adventure Girl before she was due to fly to Greenland to see Carter off on his second attempt to reach Newfoundland in a knarr, the sort of Viking craft Ericson sailed a thousand years ago.

Mullen says her department is an outgrowth of Lands’ End’s corporate sponsorship programs. It was created as a result of Carter’s first attempt at crossing the Atlantic last year (DIRECT, Sept. 1, 1997), which Lands’ End also sponsored.

The complexity of that project as well as the number of hits on Carter’s page on Lands’ End’s Web site, prompted the cataloger to establish the department last fall and a special Web site (www.beyond.landsend.com) in December 1997.

Lands’ End, Mullen explains, provides laptops and satellite links in return for journal entries and digital photography for the Web site.

(According to an article written by Carter in the July 1998 issue of Outside magazine, the total sponsorship came to about $500,000.)

Mullen stresses that Lands’ End is looking for adventures with some sort of educational or scientific element, and not adventure for the sake of adventure.

Remind us to get back to Mullen before we pack our bags for Bhutan.